Mad about the boy

When Sarah Palin's daughter Bristol became pregnant during last year's White House race, her then boyfriend Levi Johnston shot to fame. Now he is trading insults with her mother and about to strip off for a magazine

Levi Johnston underwent a makeover before appearing alongside his then girlfriend, Bristol Palin, at the Republican National Convention. Photograph: Tannen Maury/EPA

For a man who is to be crowned by the Gawker websites at an awards ceremony in New York next month as America's biggest emerging sex symbol, Levi Johnston cuts a very modest figure when you meet him in person. He is wearing a pair of black canvas work trousers that are splattered with mud, a scraggy T-shirt advertising Browning rifles and a khaki cap from under which a splodge of rather greasy dark hair curls up. He badly needs a shave.

To be fair, he has just got back from what he calls a "suicide trip", meaning a spontaneous hunting expedition, to the Alaskan outback. He and three buddies tracked and killed two black bears, skinning the hide off the 7ft-long animals to turn them into trophies (they didn't keep the meat because he says its "not very good").

Immediately before that he was away for a fortnight's moose hunting. And earlier in the summer he was out on the mountain ranges hunting sheep. Wait a minute, I say, as we sit talking in an office in downtown Anchorage, Alaska's largest city. Did you say hunting sheep?

"Yeah. But it's a totally different kind of sheep. They are living in the craziest, hardest mountains to climb, with cliffs on either side – if you slip and fall you are done. Besides, sheep are very smart animals."

I interject a second time. Sheep are very clever animals.

"Yeah. Dall sheep are very smart."

I've been with Johnston for under 10 minutes and already the conversation has taken a turn that, were we anywhere else, would seem bizarre. But that's the way with Alaska, and certainly with Levi Johnston – you cannot understand the place, or the man, unless you suspend judgment.

It was, after all, while Johnston was out hunting sheep on the Delta river that he received the news that was to change his life. It was 29 August 2008. When he returned to his truck at the end of the day he found his mobile phone full of messages from his girlfriend, Bristol Palin.

Her mother, the then governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin, had just been chosen as John McCain's Republican running mate, to go head-to-head against Barack Obama and Joe Biden in the US presidential elections.

That announcement didn't just propel Palin from relative political obscurity into the stratosphere, turning her into the darling of large sections of the Republican rump and a soon-to-be bestselling author. It also dragged Johnston kicking and screaming behind her. Before that moment, his life had been unremarkable. He planned to be a professional ice hockey player or, if that failed, an electrician like most of the men in his family.

But from that instant, he found himself sucked into a media scrum within which he's been confined pretty much ever since. When it was revealed just a few days after Palin's candidacy was announced that her daughter was pregnant, interest in Johnston exploded. His photograph was plastered over newspapers, TV channels and billboards in the US; his childish MySpace utterances were forensically dissected; there was talk of a White House wedding should there be a McCain-Palin win.

Since the election last November, the birth of his son, Tripp, and his later split with Bristol, there has been no let up. His unsophisticated tastes have been recast into the image of a male model, a would-be Hollywood actor, and now Gawker award-winner. In short, the sheep hunter has been transformed into an international sex symbol.

At first he resisted. When he heard Bristol Palin's phone message on that fateful day, pleading with him to quit hunting and come home from the mountains, his instinctual reaction was to say no.

"I didn't want to go down there in front of the cameras. I didn't want to get involved in all that TV and stuff. I wasn't that kind of kid. I don't go to parties, I never went to the prom. I just hang out with a tight group of hockey friends, just doing our own thing."

Over time, though, his resistance turned into acquiescence and then into enthusiasm. He has accepted the lot that fortune has thrown at him and decided to run with it. He recently starred in a television ad, for pistachio nuts, which features him standing beside his bodyguard with the voice over: "Now Levi Johnston does it with protection." He is in dialogue with a satellite TV station to do a reality show on an undisclosed theme. And he is to appear naked in Playgirl magazine, for which he has been training in the gym up to three hours a day, six days a week. All at the tender age of 19.

The plan to turn Johnston into a celebrity belongs to the two African American minders he took on board a few months ago: a lawyer called Rex Butler and a bodyguard – he of the pistachio ad – called Tank. It is in their offices that we are sitting and talking. Tank works as a private detective doing criminal work and what he calls infidelity cases. Butler is a litigation lawyer who represented Johnston's mother when she was charged last December with prescription drug violations (she is currently in jail awaiting sentencing). Butler has newspaper cuttings of his cases all over his office walls, and a plaque that reads: "You're in trouble. Big trouble. You need a lawyer. You need Rex Butler."

Between them, the two men act as Johnston's bodyguards, media agents, advisers, mentors, guardians and priests all rolled into one. It's obvious from the way Johnston interacts with them that he depends on them. "No 'yes' and 'no' answers!", Tank barks before we start the interview, and Johnston dutifully obeys, only rarely falling into the monosyllables for which he is notorious.

This unlikely pair of minders is also helping Johnston to steer his way through the most sensitive and difficult on-going challenge: his relationship with Sarah Palin. As the father of her grandson, Tripp, who was born on 27 December, Johnston will forever be linked to Palin.

As she gears herself up for the launch of her multimillion dollar and already massively bestselling book, Going Rogue, she is being increasingly goaded by Johnston. Though he split up with her daughter in March, he continues to act as Palin's irritant-in-chief, accusing her of blocking his access to his son, of being a hypocritical politician and a distant mother, and unfit to govern should she run for the presidency in 2012.

It was not always so sour between them. "We were pretty close until after the election," Johnston says. "Sarah is really good at throwing on that face and smile and being friendly. I always thought she liked me, but later on I discovered that I don't think she did."

In Johnston's account of what happened in the run-up to the presidential election, Palin treated him like modelling clay – taking this rugged teenager and smoothing him out to fit the image of the perfect, loyal family man that she wanted presented to the news channels. Even before she was chosen as McCain's running mate, she was pressuring him and Bristol to marry, he says. "Oh yeah, that's what Sarah and Todd [her husband] wanted. She just kept mentioning that we should, she was all in a hurry, so I was 'Alright, I'll do it!'"

Johnston claims she even offered to adopt Tripp. He says he and Bristol were appalled by the suggestion, which Palin made over the phone while he was at a tattoo parlour, though Palin has strongly denied this.

After the election any positive feelings between Johnston and the Palin family vanished, though he still wears Bristol's name in a floral tattoo on his ring finger, having not got round to having it removed. Sarah Palin's attitude, he says, changed overnight after she lost the race. "Suddenly it was 'Maybe you ought to think again about marriage, wait, maybe do it next year.' So at that point I had to think that she had just wanted us to marry to make herself look better in the campaign, to boost things up."

The marriage wasn't the only way the Palin campaign sought to mould him. When he arrived in Minnesota last September for Palin's big speech to the Republican National Convention, he was met by wardrobe artists sent to prepare him for the cameras.

"These guys came up to me and said they were going to cut my hair. I had a mullet at the time and they cut it off. It was a joke in the first place, a hockey guy joke. I'm glad they cut it off – if I had gone on national TV with that thing! Wow, it was ugly!"

Then they gave him new clothes. "So they are getting us all pretty [pronounced 'purdy'], and they have these monographed suits laid out on the bed. Armani, Burberry, all kinds of wardrobe. I hadn't even seen Armani clothes before. I just thought, come on!"

Palin's marching orders to him at the convention were "stay calm, don't talk to the cameras and don't do anything," which for a then 18-year-old, better versed in the behaviour of Dall sheep than of the world's media, was probably sound advice.

As the election campaign progressed, Johnston says he started noticing a growing split between the Sarah Palin he knew, his future mother-in-law, and the one she presented to the American voters. "Some of the things she said! It was funny; you could catch her out lots of times. Like when she couldn't answer on TV what paper she read. She don't read a newspaper! I never saw her read a newspaper. A lot of things she said, I knew she was lying."

In front of the crowds, she was Palin the huntin' and shootin' Alaskan. Yet Johnston – who really is a huntin' and shootin' Alaskan, there's the mud on his trousers to prove it – remembers her asking him to show her how to shoot a gun she kept hidden under her bed, and he only saw her fish once for the benefit of the cameras. "I'd say she's definitely stretching it big time, 'cause for three years I never even seen her touch a gun, or go fishing."

The experience of watching her perform through the election, knowing what he knows about her, has left Johnston sceptical about a Palin run on the White House in 2012. "It's a horrible idea. I just don't think she's got a chance to make it."

Would she make a good president?

"No."

Tank is in the room, and gives him one of his menacing looks as if to say: "No 'no' answers".

There is an undertow in what Johnston says that is clearly threatening to Palin. He says he knows "a lot – I still know more out there" and if he were to talk, it would "hurt her, or get her into trouble", though he insists he doesn't want to do that.

Palin, through her spokeswoman, has accused him of exploiting his relationship with the family for his own ends, rather than seeking to do what's best for his son. So is he?

"There's bad and good in everyone. But some of the shit she pulled on me, encouraging Bristol not to let me see the kid. From her acting like she liked me, to that ... The route I chose to pick was because they wouldn't let me see my kid."

What about Palin's claims that he is lying about her in order to forward his own celebrity?

"Everything I've ever said is the truth. People can think what they want – that's cool. I'm not asking for everyone to like me. I don't care. I'm just doing my thing, that's what I care about."

In a funny way, Johnston and the woman who almost became his mother-in-law are strangely similar. He is trying to carve an acting career out of nothing but the fact that he once had unprotected sex with the daughter of someone who went on to become famous.

Palin was mayor of a town with 9,000 citizens, did well to become governor of Alaska, one of the most remote and sparsely populated states in the US, and was plucked out of nowhere and into the spotlight by a struggling McCain. Now she is poised to launch her bestselling book, and then, who knows, another run on the White House?

Levi Johnston is preparing to pose for Playgirl. In our celebrity culture, they are a perfect match.